Office of Performance Improvement

Creating a Community Health Improvement Plan

Choose a step below to learn more about how it contributes to this process.

1. Organize

A. Revisit your Planning Team

The planning team for the community health improvement plan may be the same team that came together for the community health assessment, or you may decide to change members to share the workload and get different perspectives. The team may still include:

CHS administrator/director

CHS department directors

CHS supervisors

Key public health staff

B. Revisit your Partnership

Consider whether the findings from your assessment indicate a need for new or different members on your planning partnership. Check in with your current members to get their input on expanding the partnership. Make sure the process is meeting their needs and they are still fully engaged.

C. Set Additional Meeting Dates, Times, Locations as Needed

The schedule of meetings should respect the time commitments of the partnership; if community members are involved, some meetings may need to be held in the evening or on weekends.

D. Develop Communications

Make sure your communications plan includes the
community health improvement plan.

With the partnership vision in mind (developed during the community health assessment process), review the results of your assessment to determine the issues you will include in your plan. The community health assessment results in a list, reported to MDH, of your 10 most important community health issues.

While these may naturally form the basis of your community health improvement plan, your community health improvement plan does not have to include all of these or be limited to these ten. You may decide to develop a community health improvement plan around your top five issues, or build one that encompasses 15 or 20 issues. It is up to your partnership to determine the degree of focus for the community health improvement plan.

3. Formulate Goals, Strategies, and Roles

Determine what you hope to accomplish for your priority issues, how you will know you are making progress, and the ways in which everyone in the community can contribute to community health improvement, whether through independent action or coordination/collaboration. This is also sometimes referred to as an action plan.

Develop your planning report: this may be a written document or web-based information for the community. Refer to your communications plan for dissemination.

Each community health board is asked to submit a community health improvement plan to MDH by March 31, 2015.